Quick Thought: On Goals
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about goals. It seems that the older I get the harder it is to set goals, even very small ones. My friend Justin and I talked about this just the other day. I thought he made a very good point that when we were younger we used to just pick up and do things without a second thought. You’d come up with a goal and bam you were acting on it.
Maybe it’s part of growing up and gaining responsibility, but I think there’s something more to it than just that. I think there’s a tendency to look at something that you want to do and think, “Yeah, I could try to do that, but I might fail, and then I’m back where I started, but with less time.” But you’re really not. Failure is a good thing — I’ve learned way more from failures than from any success. Perhaps it’s tied to a sense of our own mortality. We perceive that we have less time to waste on “failure” and that we have to get everything right the first time. And that’s stifling.
When I was a kid failure meant nothing, because I had plenty of time to do it right. And that was when I did a lot of really cool stuff. I need to start living like I did when I was a kid, and not worry about the failures. I’ll certainly learn a lot more.